A Deepening Family

It’s a huge break up with a lot more repercussions. These repercussions increase exponentially when kids are involved. It was absolutely mind blowing to think about it. I had the opportunity to study about how the lives of family members are affected by divorce and my sentiments go out to all those involved. Marriage is built around boundaries, trust, and love. Divorce is ending that and parting ways. That in and of itself is a really difficult thing to do. I don’t have experience with being divorced but I can only imagine that it hurts more than breaking up with a girlfriend. That I do have experience in and it hurts a lot. So take that pain and multiply it by a lot and you get a divorce. The feelings of that divorce spread throughout a family. The father, mother, children, and in-laws feel it.  It is difficult for both of the parents of children to split up especially if one gets more time with the kids than the other does. Even though two people may split up, that doesn’t ...

We all have basic needs to survive and thrive. I love to think about our needs and how they apply to our lives and specific circumstances. It is always a small list that is so general that we can pinpoint our needs in each challenge. What’s even more cool is that even though they are so general, it is still a super effective way to think about problems and figure out how to solve them. For a while I have been living with the list that we need to survive, love and be loved, feel valued, and have variety. I love thinking about my life within these categories, but more recently I have learned a new list that I have loved to explore. In this list of needs we need contact and feelings of belonging, power, protection, the ability to withdraw, and challenges. These needs have less to do with physical survival like with food, water, shelter, and clothing and they have more to do with the mental/emotional aspects of our lives. There are bound to be some overlaps from the first list to the sec...

So I thought of something very interesting this week. Self-reliance and union are on two opposite ends of a spectrum. Self-reliance is the idea of not needing anyone else to provide for you and union is the idea of different parties coming together to act as one. Neither is what humans can actually do to its fullest extent because we were made to balance the two. We need to be able to stand on our own enough to help balance out those you are connected to and we need to be connected with others enough so that we can be balanced out in our marriages, relationships within our families, and friendships.  When I think about being self-reliant, I think of not needing anyone and not needing anything other than myself. When I started to dissect the term, I thought of being financially independent and able to keep my emotional stability without a therapist. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the weaknesses of human beings and how much we rely on things. As a speci...